A/N: What can I say? For my friend Mendelssohn, who loves music and wanted poems for Fall and Summer. For my idol Newkirk's Heroes, whose poems, especially "Explaining April", makes mine look like children mumbling. For fellow poet Toom iki, whose haikus are much more poignant slices of nature than mine are. For dear dear Amalin, whose reviews make me feel loved every single time. For everyone, all my readers. Enjoy!

~i. January~

When Simon and Garfunkel sungof the sound of silence,and the slow cancer that spreads through it,like snow,and where, outsidefrost hangs from particles of air.When, then,not looking for warmth nor cold,do we seek for the last edgesof sunblanched ice flowersopening like the drips of an icicle?Is notthe wind-blasted sunlight enoughfor dreams of fog tonightand the absolute zeroof a fraying swab of insomnia?Ah! On cold Januaryyou placed your ambition.Like cold January, you searched for whatthe unattainable could give you.Dream, then, of leaf green snowand crimson flowersof whose warmth you can never hold.

~ii. February~

We talkof la petite mortand point to the salmon pink remnants of love.The cherry blossom frozen in a patch of ice.The Japanese geisha watchingfrom behind a rice screen painted with fleeing birdsthe powdered face hiding what expression may cross.O St. Valentine!Watch the bodies, how they twist and turn!As if paths cross against a spider web.Of bone white and flower pink,the rose attached to her desk.La petite mort,dear St. Valentine,Tell me,what little deaths should we sufferfor the yearning we gave name to as love?La petite mort,the little deaths we endurewhen, like the geisha,we watch from the veiled surroundingsto where bells sing so softly,none but the unloved can hear.They sing of the little deathsof St. Valentineand of the fading love letter pressed with dry flowers.

~iii. March~

My piano teacherlikes to play Chopin.He has long graceful flat fingerswith veins, large and a faint tint of blue.channels on Mars.Except I'd rather like to thinkthat he is gaseous Venuswith her rings of ice and rock.Chopin spinning in his head,all tender brilliant springand March.The grand waltzes like March,creeping in with violent beauty and soothing liveliness.Wisteria and dogwood and sunlit dandelions.March,with nothing to take away butthe gray blush of winter,and nothing to give butthe echoes of birdsong.

We both have our reasons.stillwe find what we have lostin those spring days that are illogical.taking two human vectors,restlessness and want,mixing them, a dot product of sorts.Told that nature is spontaneous,why then,do we apply simple formulated mathto that with no pattern?Outside,May may beckon to me,with the random song of grass and trees.Thus, with no tears to cry,it is only when restlessness and want becomeorthogonal, nothing, or lust,(maybe love, if one still believes in that)that Spring, in the form of airy May,seeps like immortal winethrough our veins.Only then,one who believes in the song of Scarborough Fairand one who follows Greensleeves insteadsing the same tune,a melody as meaningless as May itself.

~vi. June~

Dusky as his eyes,Starlight.Him holding vigil over a lone candle.You framed in the doorway, watching him.Me silently pondering the workings of smoke.You say you care nothing for him.Why, then, in the June twilight,with dew touched grass beneath you,the violin of crickets,and the moon as a stagelight,why then,do you let your eyes etch his figureinto your memory?His hands stretched out to embracewarm velvet June sky.His feet planted firmly against the ground.an e. e. cummings effect.the newlY born colt,his hands like earth yearning for her lover sky.and youyearning for him.While I look away and surrender to June.

~vii. July~

The feel of persimmon and eucalyptus oil-No.That is not the way to begin.But with what beginningcan we give to July?Brings to mindof bamboo and fleur-de-lis.but who knows why?The last of the summer,crabapple trees in full bloom,or so I remember.Pomegranates-no, that is of winter.The story of Ceres and Hades.Winter loved Summerand kidnapped her,only to find her like gold-flinted ice.To melt away into a small mirror of color.Where he, icy Winter,looks at himself,a dejected Narcissus.And Fall (no, no, it was echo)faded away while melancholy Winter pined,his hands wet with the blood of summer.What, July?Not a murder story, but a sad romance.Of the last ice cream days before the Fall.Autumn is Falling.(the wings of an angelwraps dying sun in their embrace.)

And if I should fall,(coffee bean brown scent of crushed leaveseven though you say cinnamon)caughtby maple leaves and the powder white of birch trees.more parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.when under a mat of silent soggy leaves,A wave of undergrowth creeping like chocolate.The microphone flush and cold against my lips,but Ihave nothing more to say.September, pulling at my voice with ribbons of emptinessRegardlessof what fall wraps as its cloak around me.to protect me from Septembers antics.Do you understand?No, neither do I.For though September, mischievous September, is playingwith my silence,some underlying sense of life or death,an unspoken death wish.September loves and loses and loves again.One day,it will lose everything.

~x. October~

He doesn't believe in Halloween anymore.Not likewhen his mother dressed him upin a fancy costume and made him parade around for candy,or like whenthe fake cotton cobwebshanging from black branchesmade him shiver.He calls it All Hallows Eve insteadand makes it his own All Soul's Night,like the O-bon festivalin Japan.He likes the October darknesswhen he sits next to his bonfire,the scent of raw apples and sharp spearmintin the fire.Cupping frozen white hands around his face,but his eyesdarkened by pupils and the iris and Octoberwatching the firetiptoe slowly into embers.

~xi. November~

In the after math of someunnamed shock,November flows inwith liquid limbs but crystalline bloodWhy like Grecian statues?Reasons are ineffableThe names of a felineNovember,like a cat treading quick with veins of burgundybody heavy with sleep,crawls onto your lap.demandingattention, love, hate, a decision.But you, indecisive,can only stare at November on your lapand do nothing.The battle scarsfrom scratching your heart with Novemberglow red.

~xii. December~

Burying the last of the year's leavesunder a sheet of ice.Naïveté frozen?Oh no, long dead.Already stripped from the wine grape vines,where secrets are caught and stored awayin a bottle made from the fragments of a mirrorfall.So,December,a walk in otherwise lifeless woods.Robert Frost-esque dream of footprints tracking down to a clearing without gray sky.A subtle trace of larkspur blue and orchard purple.Flowers.an echo of February?December on its own.Yes,December on its own.Valediction to the fair year, to soft days of winter's light.December,of peppermintand blue white and-

simply,Winter.

~xiii. Epilogue for the Reader (because it is already)~

Not falling,but moreslowly sauntering downwardwhilethe author pours out meaningless dribblein anonymous black and white.Soto the reader:Endings,like all beginnings,belong to the reader.What words are tossed in the mass,of seasons and glory and sorrow and autumn,they are to the reader.Whether it is aboutthe fireflies of light on rain-dropped carsor onthe fallen history of a beautiful city,it is to the reader.What meaning is takenfrom these words,it is to the reader.And you,the reader,whether you area poet,an artist,an author,a dancer,the poem is for you- and in that moment-for you alone.

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